It’s tempting to comment on the Gospel reading of Matthew’s account of the loaves and the fishes, but the reading is familiar to all and I fear that I would have little to say that you, the reader, haven’t thought of already.

But the first reading about the children of Israel lamenting their lack of food and their nostalgia about their captivity in Egypt spoke directly to me. I am not one of those people who suffers in silence when facing a challenge, whether it be physical, emotional or what have you. To some extent this is part of my coping mechanism because it helps me to talk about it with other people. There’s a certain healthy aspect to this I suppose, but I fear I often underestimate Evil One’s deviousness. One way that he tries to trick us is to trap us into self pity. “See, if God really loved you and cared about you, he wouldn’t do this to you!” So he tempts us into self pity and ignoring other people because after all we’re suffering. Of course it’s good to try to get help but to give God the cold shoulder is exactly what the Evil One wants us to do. If he can do that, he can turn us from children of God into children of self pity and self indulgence. We can’t let it happen.